The disclosed embodiments relate generally to a method and system for distributing jobs in a manufacturing or production process.
Manufacturing and production processes produce results by receiving sets of instructions and materials required to create or modify an item, such as a document, a vehicle, a computing device, or another item. Often the processes must permit some customization or alteration of individual items based on customer desires. For example, although an automobile production line may be configured to produce a particular make and model of car, the individual cars produced may have different specifications, such as leather or cloth seating, standard or premium wheels, exterior paint color, and other specifications of type. As another example, document production environments, such as print shops, convert printing orders, such as print jobs, into finished printed material. A print shop may process print jobs using resources such as printers, cutters, collators and other similar equipment. Typically, resources in print shops are organized such that when a print job arrives from a customer at a particular print shop, the print job can be processed by performing one or more production functions.
Scheduling architectures that organize jobs in a production process and route the jobs to autonomous cells are known in the art and are described in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 7,051,328 to Rai et al. and U.S. Pat. No. 7,065,567 to Squires et al., the disclosures of which are incorporated by reference in their entirety.
Variation in these production requirements from job to job can cause significant processing delays even when resources have been allocated to balance the job flow. For example, jobs can have a number of different setup characteristics, and each setup characteristic may correspond to several different characteristic types. Significant setup delays can arise in processing jobs with variable setup characteristics in a production environment. Setup time can be particularly acute in production environments where substantial interruption in operation is unacceptable, such as environments that utilize continuous feed or processing equipment. Setup delays can significantly impact throughput.